We love us some urban gardening and this new plant cube in Getafe, Spain has us giddy with leafy excitement. It is a four sided vertical garden installed on top of a shopping center to muffle and cool their refrigeration unit. What a green solution for a widespread, unattractive problem! Installed by Paisajismo Urbano — Urban Landscape in English — the cube is the first of its kind and will create enough oxygen for 128 people for a whole year.

While developing the cube the landscape architects needed to keep in mind the fact that they have four different walls each with different sun arcs throughout the day. They created a sun specific plan for the plantings that kept each side covered with the appropriate vegetation. The cube has a pretty amazing smart irrigation system that performs automatic watering and fertilization. In the event of an unexpected incident it sends a text message to the caretaker of the cube to alert them of the problem.

The cube consists of 2,500 plants ranging from herbs to ferns to perennials that cover 128 square meters of wall space. Nacho Solano, the director of Paisajismo Urbano noted that they are currently monitoring and recording information from all of their vertical wall gardens in order to improve future performance. No doubt we’ll be interested in following this project in the future to see how it grows.